Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are often characterized by atypical sensory behavior (hyperor hyporeactivity) although evidence is scarce regarding olfactory abilities in ASD; 16 adults with high-functioning ASD (mean age: 38.2, SD: 9.7) and 14 healthy control subjects (mean age: 42.0 years, SD: 12.5) were assessed in odor threshold, free and cued odor identification, and perceived pleasantness, intensity, and edibility of everyday odors. Although results showed no differences between groups, the Bayes Factors (close to 1) suggested that the evidence for no group differences on the threshold and identification tests was inconclusive. In contrast, there was some evidence for no group differences on perceived edibility (BF01 = 2.69) and perceived intensity (BF01 = 2.80). These results do not provide conclusive evidence for or against differences between ASD and healthy controls on olfactory abilities. However, they suggest that there are no apparent group differences in subjective ratings of odors.
To pick up 3-D aspects of pictures is arguably the most difficult problem concerning tactile pictorial perception by the blind. The aim of the experiments reported was to examine the potential utility of texture gradients in this context. Since there is
We investigated whether people can use haptic liquid-specific information made available by shaking the vessel containing the liquid. In experiment 1 we studied to what extent people can discriminate between liquid and solid substances and determine the amount of substance in the shaken vessel, as well as the effects of exploratory procedures on these abilities. Exploratory procedures including horizontal shaking of the vessel produced accurate identification of the content and more precise judgments for a liquid than for a solid, but vertical lifting produced an overestimation of the amount of liquid. In experiment 2 we demonstrated that people can discriminate between the amount of liquid and the amount of solid in the same vessel. Three theories of what liquid-specific stimulus properties are picked up by shaking the vessel are preliminarily examined.
Response times (RTs) in visual search were measured with either a single target specified by colour, motion, spatial frequency, or orientation alone, or specified by pairwise conjunctions of these features, or by presenting double targets, each specified by a separate feature. First, for all feature combinations, except for motion–colour, RTs were faster when double features were used to specify a single target than when they specified separate targets, implying location-specific redundancy gains predicted by coactivation on a common location-specific map. Second, coactivation, as revealed by race-model violations, occurred for all double-feature single-target conditions except the motion–colour and colour–orientation combinations. No violations occurred in double-target conditions. Taken together, these results are accounted for by well-known feature-specific sensitivities of cortical V1 cells and provide further evidence for a V1 locus of redundancy gain in visual search.
Structure-from-motion (SFM) perception is hypothesised to be mediated by units that sense the near-far relationships in transparency-from-motion (TFM) and orientation-from-motion (OFM). The frequency of subjective reversals during observation of ambiguous
A new visual phenomenon, inter-attribute illusory (completed) contours, is demonstrated. Contour completions are perceived between any combination of spatially separate pairs of inducing elements (Kanizsa-like 'pacman' figures) defined either by pictorial